As a detective of journalist's work would perhaps, or, a journalist's historian involved in detective work, Natalie Zemon Davis reveals the who, what, when and how of al-Hassan al-Wassan's production of books. The story comes in a series of layers. Once the process is learned, the narrative pages lifted and removed and analyzed and then placed expertly back into place, one after another, she renders it seemingly simply as the details coalesce into a fine grain picture. But unlike a regular linear book here, over and over, certain details and approaches and relations with the people, places, and processes are slightly repeated in order to tease out this or that aspect of the various contexts. This is also a wonderful thing if at first, it seems a bit ponderous. Going back to this book again and again, I find more and more each time I do.
Forced into leaving with his family as refugees from Spain, he found work. Literate he could act as a scribe in present-day Morooco as a kind of notary, and then after many trials as an ambassador to the sultan of Fez. After many more travels he found himself captured by pirates and then under guard under the Castell San Angelo in Rome. In time, after catechism and conversion, and the curious adoption by Pope Leo X in 1520, al-Hasan opted to travel. Venturing to Venice and Florence, Naples, and probably, Davis figures, spending more time in Bologna and Viterbo outside of Rome, he could learn enough of the local language and customs, as well as the words for certain things from the many people he could meet along the way.
In addition to a grammar for Arabic, al-Hasan wrote a number of other books while in Italy, that is, before his departure in 1527. Either with (or working for) Cardinal Egido in Viterbo, or, for Alberto Pio (now the ambassador for French King Francis), or alongside (perhaps even in consultation with) Jacob Mantino (the Jewish doctor in Rome), al-Hasan found time to write a number of collections.
What he is most known for though is his Description of Africa. This too Davis so carefully pores over layer upon layer, that she can make look easy revealing all that time has gathered in curtains of obscurity. There are the possible influences, as well as physical processes, even interpreted intentions she brings to light and places it all in those turbulent times. Nothing all at once, each in its time, each article carefully handled and turned to see how it might fit with the other pieces of all these stories that have come down to us.
The Cardinal didn't like Muslims in Europe or Asia or Africa, but accepted al-Hasan as his godson. Davis quotes this cardinal's sermons as divisive examples regarding various misinterpretation of Islamic traditions, pointing out that al-Hassan had to know the good cardinal was getting it wrong. [pp. 81-2]
However, a great project in the west was in compiling translations of the Bible and comparing them. Controversy over Erasmus and his (1516) New Testament translation of koine Greek apart from the Latin Vulgate (and its traditions) encouraged many others in the following years to look into Hebrew and Greek and even Aramaic languages. Some like Cisneros in Spain wanted direct comparisons between all the languages including Arabic.
From Cardinal Egido though, al-Hasan was given a Latin translation of the Quran obtained while the cardinal was in Spain. Egido had received this from one Joannes Gabriel, in order for his godson to correct the manuscript. Davis notes that al-Hasan surely found some pleasure in this work in setting many things right. [pp.241]
During this time in Italy, al-Hasan also found himself in the service of Alberto Pio. An ambassador for Maximillian and then for French King Francis, this Duke of Capri asked al-Hasan for him to copy an Arabic translation of the letters of Paul found then in the Vatican Library. [p. 69] Both their association and the task could be beneficial for al-Hasan. Through dialogue with this august person, he might learn some of the intentions of the new French King, who Pio represented in Rome, and also, from such a text, at least potentially, a clearer view into the ways Paul's thought could be expressed in Arabic. This too could also more firmly base al-Hasan's working knowledge in many common terms and concepts used in Biblical translation that he might use elsewhere as a translator.
Back in Rome, he would stay near Sant' Agostino in the Campo Marzio, Cardinal Egido's Order. [p.70] Here he could keep his access to manuscripts from the Church, have time and space to work on an increasing number of projects and, keep an eye on the various comings and goings of churchmen and ambasadors and the swirling opinions that always seemed to be rising to a fever pitch there and then.
In the early 1520's there had been a rapid succession of popes. Leo X (the Medici pope that had adopted and baptised al-Hasan), died on the first of December, 1521, and he was replaced with Adrian of Utrecht. A doctor of theology at the University of Leuven, Adrian had become tutor to the future Charles V, and even co-regent with Cisneros over Spain, until Charles could mature and gain accession there. In this way Adrian's own accession to the papacy was fraught with dissent as many at first feared a schism or severe break among the churches of Italy, France or Spain, with the head at Rome. Everyone wanted their own man and everyone distrusted each other. But even Adrian knew there were two chief concerns for a new pope. There was an acknowledged need within the church for broad reform and a need to quell spreading Lutheranism. There was also a stated need to combat the Turk who had extended territorially in places beyond Greece.
It took over seven months for Adrian to arrive from Spain to Rome, and after a few attempts at reform, and just after a year and two weeks there, he died. Again for the next vote, Medici influence in Rome prevailed and Giulio di Giuliano, a cousin to Leo X became the new pope. Francis I in Paris was alarmed at this return to Italian-based power and focused on reestablishing French power there by sending his armies to Milan. Against this background of shifting power, alliances and motivations, a wise observer might avoid trouble by staying clear out of the way, working on manuscripts, detailing translations, writing down things if only he could recall.
Where Cardinal Egido or Alberto Pio might dictate letters or essays to a scribe, Davis tells us, al-Hasan would write in his own hand with a pen and ink, going left to right on a line, and in the local Italian language. [p.96] He had reasons too for writing this for an Italian audience. With reports coming in daily of news from the wider world, their imaginative and mental world was rapidly filling up with exciting tales of explorers in the Americas. Al-Hasan could see the locals here also knew less about their continental neighbors to the south. During his stay he could see the proliferation of printed books and how they could influence and educate whether with accurate or inaccurate information and much else.
If he could secure a publisher, his work on Africa might find many eager readers even beyond those well-educated who knew Latin. But with a press he could also guess that his work might travel and last longer than a single hand-written manuscript. Thus anything he might say about Africa or the people there, their customs or, about Islam or its traditions and histories might also be read by some future Muslim reader. [pp. 106-8, 124] This, Davis points out is another reason for al-Hasan to be careful about what and how he set things down.
This manuscript on Africa would be finished March 10, 1526 and stretch out over 900 pages. This would be given to a scribe who would rewrite it, mistakes and all, and then hand it over to be shelved. This copy was discovered around 1930 and stays at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome. The stories of 'Leo Africanus' would proliferate and spread many misunderstandings in the intervening years but this seems to be the fault of the messengers along the way and does not seem the result of al-Hasan's work.
________________________________________
Davis, Natalie Zemon: Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds, Hill and Wang, A Division of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, NY, 2006
Sunday, December 31, 2017
new fiction already dun, year's end 2017
Finishing a couple more books of fiction this year, it seemed as good a time as any to mention those, and the others done, and a few additional items that have worked their way to the top of the various piles roundabout. The only way out is through. This blog continues so very slowly, ponderously. The dispatches seem random or misplaced. But this too paralells the times: falling backward into the future. A manufactured past, born of some pined-over, wished-for narrative. No matter how perfectly imagined, fantastic, dangerous or absurd, is no guarantor of a more certain modernity. The message seems to be again and again: "Just don't go out."
For one thing it is terminally cold. Right now it is the coldest it has been all year here. At year's end and beginning. The furnace here won't come on automatically, so the oven and stovetop become the primary heatsource. A secondary ground level space heater barely registers when kept in proximity of outstreched legs. Additional layers about the shoulders, and a single bulb lit above completes this wan, brief picture.
Unlike earlier this year, these last two books I'm finishing today end with the imposition of gunshots. The reader was warned with plenty of foreshadowing and circumstance. Plenty of projected possibilities on who and what, but not why. Or rather, the motives are expertly set up and lain out but then, the location, the actors, the scene are disrupted. Old ghosts of memory play tricks and pure chance grabs scene-stealing thunder. The authors are prize-winning modernists of very different genres, but I can't escape the conclusion the endings feel pat. The gunshots. The someones who always fall and who least deserve it. After so much literate beauty or elegance, the racing zing of strophaic plot suspension, usually for memory-bound exposition, in the end, these solutions, for me, lack sublimity. Maybe it's the weather and my mental mood instead.
Which is too bad because the writing in the great bulk of both of these is fantastic, immersive, thoughtful, adventurous. Zadie Smith's bestselling, award-winning White Teeth (2000) has immense characterization of entire families over several generations and continents. The narrative style crams so much street patois and interjects so many cultural monikers, deftly, quickly, and then, passed up for more heaping ladles of steaming post-modern, stomach-clutching laughter, one has to look again to see if there wasn't something you missed. It's thoughtful and real by turn, penetrating with its talk of genetics, and appearance and, sequestered longing. A part or apart?
Most of the characters live out of the baggage they alone carry in memory. Not just their baggage, their interpretation of the baggage. They all have different understandings of how they got here and what it means, how to carry on. What to do about their condition. But they manage not to be really heard except by strangers and that's always fleeting. But main characters do learn and grow, a little, somewhat.
This is the case in Robert Olen Butler's Perfume River (2016) which I happened to read in an uncorrected proof. The style here is spare, simple, straightforward. Almost all of it moves in those interior spaces between thought and emotion, and mostly before these are expressed verbally. This is handled with an almost austere delicacy and the subject matter deserves it. There are a pair of brothers whose father fought under Patton in WWII. One brother goes to Viet Nam, the other to Canada. The father wants his boys to be like him. Neither are. One pretends all his life as if he is, the other could not care less.
The silences between all the characters here takes up as much space in this book as would adding five or six additional agonists. The silences between them are part of the narratives that drive these characters along. What to say or not to say, the habitual reply, the muted surprise, the weighted pause, all veil long-guarded interior fields of barren shrubbery or, desolate warehouses. These are counterpoised by a third rail that never gets to go live, a character whose wheel never hums. But the same could be said for the secondary characters here in this edition as well. Mother and son grow by book's end. But the spouses of all these, at this stage are cardboard cutout with muted color transfers. They neither sing nor turn. But, those intermittent distances between bright memory and dull present are so carefully handled by Butler, we so easily slip in and out of them, it's as if he writes with map at hand. It may be this uncorrected proof was his map and the later wide-release edition fleshes these out more fully.
For one thing it is terminally cold. Right now it is the coldest it has been all year here. At year's end and beginning. The furnace here won't come on automatically, so the oven and stovetop become the primary heatsource. A secondary ground level space heater barely registers when kept in proximity of outstreched legs. Additional layers about the shoulders, and a single bulb lit above completes this wan, brief picture.
Unlike earlier this year, these last two books I'm finishing today end with the imposition of gunshots. The reader was warned with plenty of foreshadowing and circumstance. Plenty of projected possibilities on who and what, but not why. Or rather, the motives are expertly set up and lain out but then, the location, the actors, the scene are disrupted. Old ghosts of memory play tricks and pure chance grabs scene-stealing thunder. The authors are prize-winning modernists of very different genres, but I can't escape the conclusion the endings feel pat. The gunshots. The someones who always fall and who least deserve it. After so much literate beauty or elegance, the racing zing of strophaic plot suspension, usually for memory-bound exposition, in the end, these solutions, for me, lack sublimity. Maybe it's the weather and my mental mood instead.
Which is too bad because the writing in the great bulk of both of these is fantastic, immersive, thoughtful, adventurous. Zadie Smith's bestselling, award-winning White Teeth (2000) has immense characterization of entire families over several generations and continents. The narrative style crams so much street patois and interjects so many cultural monikers, deftly, quickly, and then, passed up for more heaping ladles of steaming post-modern, stomach-clutching laughter, one has to look again to see if there wasn't something you missed. It's thoughtful and real by turn, penetrating with its talk of genetics, and appearance and, sequestered longing. A part or apart?
Most of the characters live out of the baggage they alone carry in memory. Not just their baggage, their interpretation of the baggage. They all have different understandings of how they got here and what it means, how to carry on. What to do about their condition. But they manage not to be really heard except by strangers and that's always fleeting. But main characters do learn and grow, a little, somewhat.
This is the case in Robert Olen Butler's Perfume River (2016) which I happened to read in an uncorrected proof. The style here is spare, simple, straightforward. Almost all of it moves in those interior spaces between thought and emotion, and mostly before these are expressed verbally. This is handled with an almost austere delicacy and the subject matter deserves it. There are a pair of brothers whose father fought under Patton in WWII. One brother goes to Viet Nam, the other to Canada. The father wants his boys to be like him. Neither are. One pretends all his life as if he is, the other could not care less.
The silences between all the characters here takes up as much space in this book as would adding five or six additional agonists. The silences between them are part of the narratives that drive these characters along. What to say or not to say, the habitual reply, the muted surprise, the weighted pause, all veil long-guarded interior fields of barren shrubbery or, desolate warehouses. These are counterpoised by a third rail that never gets to go live, a character whose wheel never hums. But the same could be said for the secondary characters here in this edition as well. Mother and son grow by book's end. But the spouses of all these, at this stage are cardboard cutout with muted color transfers. They neither sing nor turn. But, those intermittent distances between bright memory and dull present are so carefully handled by Butler, we so easily slip in and out of them, it's as if he writes with map at hand. It may be this uncorrected proof was his map and the later wide-release edition fleshes these out more fully.
Monday, December 18, 2017
US Tax Bill Overhaul 2017
They're making sausage in Washington again. But only half of the two Houses in Congress are making it. The Senate bill produced this time carried without a single vote by the opposing party. This followed the House bill which had passed there the week before. The two branches then looked at the comparative chunks of their respective 'tax bills' in committee that might be passed before Christmas.
The reason is pretty easily explained by looking again at the Citizens United v FEC case decided in 2010.
Many seem so excited, in fact in such a haste to write and pass this multi-generational reform, that the public at large has been allowed but little time to scrutinize this product, let alone to have its consequences explained. Some are so willing to push this mess to pass in these last few weeks, they show how willing they are to do just about anything.
Many economists think this tax bill's effects instead will cause the opposite to happen and send the US economy into an unnecessary recession. The final vote is expected tomorrow with debates about individual prizes amidst details falling like bombs in the media landscape. It has been too difficult to even look at the procedure anymore which may explain why this process has been kept so shrouded even from the other party.
Touted by the Republican party as the first meaningful attempt at tax reform in a generation, after failing all year to come up with any other bills of substance (with or without help from President Trump), they want this 'tax plan' event tomorrow seen as a culmination highlighting their ability to govern. But the actual sausage for their national tax policy seeems only what intestines produce in a still living animal. It remains two weeks later a very partisan effort. For unless you are members of the very rich whose interests have lobbied for this kind of 'reform' by way of payment of millions of US Dollars over many years to Congress members and their parties, the opportunities remain murky. The crafters claim there is much to gain from this passage of ordure. But economists and even former Republican strategists find much to disavow.And that's it. By a vote of 51-49, taken at nearly 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning, the U.S. Senate has just voted to gut the U.S. tax code, with implications for every American.— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) December 2, 2017
A bunch of old white men are applauding as democracy dies in the darkness. pic.twitter.com/UAPFzQyTNg
This tax bill demonstrates,once again, the total collapse of all and any rigor around the policy making process in the GOP congress. It is built on a foundation of lies. It adds more than a trillion to the debt. No real conservative should vote for this— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) December 1, 2017
The reason is pretty easily explained by looking again at the Citizens United v FEC case decided in 2010.
Two words explain why this terrible tax bill will pass: Citizens United. GOP cares more about donors than voters https://t.co/JrtzpBKKdB— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 2, 2017
Many seem so excited, in fact in such a haste to write and pass this multi-generational reform, that the public at large has been allowed but little time to scrutinize this product, let alone to have its consequences explained. Some are so willing to push this mess to pass in these last few weeks, they show how willing they are to do just about anything.
But of course it's worse than that. The tax bill overall according to its cheerleaders will spur growth and spending which will create an increase in GDP growth and thus, jobs. But if interest rates continue to rise as expected, this will offset any increase in GDP generated by this tax bill. Already the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates again next year after having just done so slightly last week to set its benchmark at 1.5%.I was just handed a 479-page tax bill a few hours before the vote. One page literally has hand scribbled policy changes on it that can’t be read. This is Washington, D.C. at its worst. Montanans deserve so much better. pic.twitter.com/q6lTpXoXS0— Senator Jon Tester (@SenatorTester) December 2, 2017
The best part of this farce will be when the new Fed chair raises rates next year to totally nullify whatever (small) growth effect there might have been.— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 2, 2017
Many economists think this tax bill's effects instead will cause the opposite to happen and send the US economy into an unnecessary recession. The final vote is expected tomorrow with debates about individual prizes amidst details falling like bombs in the media landscape. It has been too difficult to even look at the procedure anymore which may explain why this process has been kept so shrouded even from the other party.
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